Foveon Introduces The First Small Format Full-Color 4.5-Megapixel Image Sensor
Santa Clara, CA, June 21, 2004 – Foveon Inc., a technology leader of award-winning high-quality digital camera image sensors, announced today the availability of the Foveon F19 sensor (FO18-50-F19), a 1/1.8-inch 4.5 Megapixel CMOS direct image sensor that incorporates Foveon’s breakthrough X3 technology to directly capture color in three layers, just like film. The company also announced that the F19 image sensor has been designed into the HanVision HVDUO-5M digital camera for industrial, scientific, medical, and communications applications.The F19 direct image sensor employs Foveon’s unique X3 stacked-pixel design. Each stack of pixels contains a red, green, and blue pixel, eliminating the need for color interpolation and blur filters which are required for conventional CCD and CMOS image sensors. Color interpolation is used by CCD and CMOS image sensors to estimate the missing color information inherent in these image sensors, which only have a single layer of pixels. Blur filters are also used in CCD and CMOS image sensors to eliminate the color artifacts, which are introduced as part of the color interpolation. The Foveon X3 F19 direct image sensor avoids these image quality compromises by utilizing the X3 stacked pixel design. As a result, the Foveon X3 F19 sensor delivers the highest degree of full color, image sharpness, and artifact-free color detail possible with a 1/1.8-inch image sensor.
Read the entire Foveon press release.
